The HERC’s decision was based on an exhaustive 100-page evidence review; a review, according to them, hampered by the low quality of the evidence on the safety of planned out-of-hospital births. Actually, there is a paucity of evidence altogether. Studies and statistics from other countries, like the Netherlands, were of limited utility because those countries have more stringent midwifery education and training requirements and non-hospital births are better integrated into the health care system.

Most planned out-of-hospital births in Oregon are attended by what are known as direct-entry midwives (DEM), as opposed to nurse midwives, and a few naturopathic doctors. (We’ll look at the many variations of midwifery in a minute.) Since OHP pays for 23% of Oregon births, the economic impact on direct-entry midwives could be substantial. This effect will be amplified when other insurers, who are expected to follow OHP’s new criteria, change their own coverage rules. (more…)

Health care systems around the world are being pressured to “do more and spend less”, to make healthcare more cost effective. Owing to aging populations and the growing cost of providing health services, there’s more scrutiny than ever on the value of different health treatments, with the goal of reducing the use of treatments that don’t help. The Choosing Wisely initiative was establishing expressly for this purpose. Regrettably, while well-intentioned, Choosing Wisely hasn’t had as much of an effect as you might expect. Medicine can be slow to change, as David Gorski discussed earlier this week. Unless we ruthlessly scrutinize what we do for effectiveness, and are willing to act on what we learn, self-driven change is unlikely. One way that governments (and insurers) can dramatically reduce the use of a health service or treatment is to simply stop offering it, or paying for it. Yet stopping funding is something that is relatively uncommon in health care. It seems to be much more difficult to stop a practice, possibly owing to inertia, a reluctance to change, and the sometimes-vociferous protests that can emerge from patients or physicians that may feel that their preferred therapy is effective. The formidable challenge of stopping health care funding, once it has started, is one reason why this blog has been very critical of the expanding scope of practice being granted to alternative medicine purveyors – the legislative alchemy that is the first step towards insurance coverage. Because once that’s in place, it will be far more difficult to stop it. So it’s essential to understand the evidence. (more…)

Yes, as hard as it is to believe, there are actually people out there who believe that there are “natural” remedies for pertussis and willing to let their children suffer the consequences.

I realize that Scott Gavura has already covered this particular case (and quite well), but it’s so egregious that I couldn’t resist discussing it myself because it is one of the most horrifying examples I’ve seen in a long time of the consequences of the sorts of beliefs that fall under the rubric of naturopathy. Quite frankly, reading the story angered me to the point that I didn’t feel it would be unduly repetitious to discuss it again. The result in this case was the prolonged and unnecessary suffering of three children, while the mother believed she was helping them.

If you want anecdotal evidence of the depths of quackery to which naturopaths can descend, read this post now. Because the link to the original post was removed once, I saved the text and will quote it liberally, but, for whatever reason, the post appears to be up again at Like-Minded Mamas, which promises “easy, natural answers for every mama’s journey.” What Dexter sees as natural treatment of her children with whooping cough, I see as child abuse. Worse, Dexter is practicing in my own state in Grand Rapids, MI.
Dexter describes herself thusly:

Here’s an indication: If you believe in reiki enough to practice reiki, you are a quack.

More importantly, if you treat your children the way Dexter describes, you are a child-abusing quack, in my not-so-humble opinion. Why do I say this? Because in her post Dexter describes how she tortured her children by letting them “get through” pertussis. Let me repeat that again in a different way. She let her children suffer through the natural course of a pertussis infection in order to acquire “natural” immunity. She even brags about it near the end of her post:(more…)

If there’s one area of “alternative” medicine that saddens (and angers) me, it’s the antivaccine movement. Most alternative medicine only risks harm to the user. But antivaccinationists threaten public health. Their actions can harm the most vulnerable in our society – often children, and others who depend on the herd immunity that vaccination provides. After my last few naturopathy vs. science posts I thought I’d take a bit of a break with another subject. However, last week ex-naturopath (and friend of the blog) Britt Hermes flagged a post from a naturopath that stunned me. Here was antivaccinationism and naturopathy, all rolled into a blog post about three children with a parent that doesn’t vaccinate. Heather Dexter, who claims to be a “Board Certified Naturopathic Doctor” in Michigan, blogs at likemindedmamas.com. She recently used her blog to describe, in astonishing, horrific, gut-wrenching detail, how she let three of her children suffer with whooping cough without seeking proper medical attention. The post was pulled down after a few days, but has recently reappeared with some modifications. (The original post, which I am quoting from below, has been archived and can be found here or here). I strongly encourage you to read the entire post in its entirety. Because amazingly, not only did Heather Dexter let her three children suffer through weeks of pain with whooping cough, she also subjected them repeatedly to invasive (and useless) alternative medicine. Yet she claims to have no regrets. (more…)

Does naturopathy offer something special or uniquely effective for the treatment of diabetes? Naturopaths are alternative medicine practitioners who claim to provide primary care, like medical doctors. Among naturopaths and their supporters, it’s regularly claimed that naturopathy offers something that “conventional” medicine does not: Naturopaths are described as “doctors plus”, using unconventional approaches to coax the body to “heal itself” with methods that are claimed to be safer and more effective than conventional drugs and medical interventions. The superiority of naturopathy over conventional medicine is an argument that showed up in the comments to my last post, when I pointed out that this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine failed to validate either naturopathy or herbalism. Here’s one example:

Someone diagnosed with pre-Type 2 diabetes could visit a Naturopathic Doctor and stop the disease in its tracks. The doctor would recommended a simple diet change to a high-fat, low-carb, zero refined sugar diet, maybe some supplements, and exercise. Bye, bye, Type 2 diabetes. The same person could visit an MD, and before you know it would be taking insulin and Metformin (and other horrible drugs) for the rest of his or her life. An added bonus with the insulin is weight gain. Notice that the diabetes commercials feature overweight actors and actresses? Yes, there are natural cures. Is this is a site promoting good health, or is it a front for the pharmaceutical companies?

Allopath – you will be taking insulin, Metformin and other drugs for the rest of your life. Your diabetes will be managed, but there will be a slow deterioration in the quality of your life.

Naturopath – we can reverse this with a change in your diet, along with exercise.

Naturopath wins.

Now this individual never claimed to be a naturopath – but testimonials like these are not surprising. I’ve written several posts in the past about the claims made by naturopaths, and how they stack up against the scientific evidence. Naturopaths offer an array of disparate health practices like homeopathy, acupuncture and herbalism that are linked by the (now discarded) belief in vitalism – the idea we have a “life force”. From this philosophy can sometimes emerge sensible health advice, but not because naturopaths are following the evidence. As long as a treatment is viewed as being congruent with the naturopathic belief system, it’s acceptably “naturopathic”. In past posts I’ve looked at the naturopathic perspectives on fake diseases, infertility, autism, prenatal vitamins, vaccinations, allergies, and even scientific facts themselves. Britt Hermes is a former naturopath and has written extensively about naturopathy from the perspective of an insider, and her evaluation is scathing: There are no naturopathic standards of care, naturopathic training is much different than what naturopaths purport, and the accreditation of naturopathic schools is questionable. Now, diabetes is a widely prevalent chronic disease. It causes a huge burden of illness on society. And while we have a fair understanding of its causes and how to treat it, there are still far too many people suffering from complications of the disease. Diabetes already requires care from multiple medical professionals, including physicians, nurses, dietitians, and pharmacists. Should naturopathy be included? Is there any evidence that demonstrates that naturopathy can “stop” diabetes? And how does advice from a naturopath differ from “conventional” medical advice? (more…)

A coffee enema – almost, but not quite, totally unlike tea…and some sort of complex analogy involving naturopathy and science.

Those of you in the know recognize the title from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, among the funniest and most quotable books of all time. If you have not read the five books in the trilogy, get to work. Consider it a homework assignment.

I bit off more than I can chew for this entry. I usually plan on about 8–10 hours over 4 –5 days to write these entries. So I had this idea. Now that naturopaths have been declared primary care providers by the Oregon legislature I thought it would be good to look over all the websites in Portland to see, in their own words, what naturopaths were offering. I figured there would not be that many sites to review. How many naturopaths could be in Portland?

There is not enough beer time in the world

Holy Cannoli. I thought there would be 30, which is the number infesting Eugene, the second most naturopathed city in Oregon. There is no way that I could do a comprehensive review of that many websites in the limited time I have to devote to the blog. But my brain is not unlike an oil tanker with blog entries, it takes a long time to change direction and I had nothing else mentally lined up to write about. (more…)

Sarah Hershberger, pictured with her family in a screenshot from a 2014 Reason.tv video.

One of the more depressing topics that I regularly write about on this blog includes of analyses of news stories of children with cancer whose parents decided to stop science-based treatment (usually the chemotherapy) and use quackery instead. There are, of course, variations on this theme, but these stories take form that generally resembles this outline: A child is diagnosed with a highly treatable cancer with an excellent cure rate. Standard science-based treatment is begun, but the child suffers severe side effects from the chemotherapy. After an incomplete course of chemotherapy, the parents, alarmed at their child’s suffering, start balking at further chemotherapy, either because the child refuses further treatment or because they do. At some point in this process the parents become aware of the claims of practitioners of this or that alternative medicine, who tell them that their child’s cancer can be cured without toxic chemotherapy, and, wooed by the siren song of a promise of a cure without suffering, the parents choose that instead. At this point, physicians, alarmed at the parents’ choice, call in their state’s child protective services team, and a court battle ensues. Sometimes the court battle results in an order that the child complete conventional therapy, as it did with, for example, Daniel Hauser or Cassandra Callender. Sometimes it ends with a compromise in which the child and/or parents can choose an unconventional practitioner, as in the case of Abraham Cherrix. All too often the courts utterly fail to protect children with cancer, as the Canadian courts did in the cases of Makayla Sault and JJ. Not infrequently, if the court rules against the parents, the parents flee with their child to avoid treatment, as happened with Daniel Hauser, Abraham Cherrix, and Sarah Hershberger. Usually, they ultimately come back.

However they turn out, over the years of looking into them I’ve found that these stories tend to bear a depressing similarity and predictability. For example, if the child does well, it is always attributed to the alternative treatment, even when the child received a significant amount of conventional therapy. This attribution derives from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the treatment of cancer works in that the problem with incomplete cancer treatment is not that it can’t cure the cancer but that it has less of a chance of doing so. As I’ve explained many times, the reason that treatment regimens for many pediatric cancers involve two years’ worth of chemotherapy is that over time pediatric oncologists learned the hard way that, although the first cycle of chemotherapy (usually called induction chemotherapy) can lead to remission, without the additional cycles the chances of recurrence are very high—unacceptably so. Consequently, children who stop chemotherapy early can be in remission; they’ve just been put at a high risk of recurrence.(more…)

I recently received an email from none other than Jann Bellamy pointing out a particular flavor of naturopathic nonsense that I had missed up until this point: “magic socks.” A quick search revealed that our own Scott Gavura had briefly mentioned this remedy in a 2013 post, but I plan on going into much greater detail. The claim contained in the newsletter attached to Jann’s email involved the use of said magic socks to “alleviate congestion.” Three links were thoughtfully provided for more information and I took the bait. Thanks Jann.

That’s right, magic socks!

The first link took me to the website of Bastyr University, where Britt Hermes matriculated to the tune of $300,000 and a leader in “innovation in natural health education” that offers numerous degrees in “science-based natural medicine.” According to the experts at Bastyr, wet sock treatment, apparently synonymous with “magic socks”, is “a natural method of stimulating the immune system and zapping a cold or flu” that involves forcing a child to don ice-cold socks overnight. They even admit that this is a treatment approach recommended regularly by the naturopathic physicians at Bastyr Center for Natural Health.

According to the chief medical officer at BCNH (seems like there should be an asterisk there or something), we shouldn’t be thrown by how much this sounds like complete and utter nonsense, because it works. He reassures us that magic socks “rally the body’s defenses” using the healing power of nature. And it’s free! All you need is water, socks, a freezer, and some electricity. Okay, so it isn’t free but it’s pretty darn cheap. (more…)

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded Monday, acknowledging the developers behind two drugs used to treat parasite infections. In a shared award, William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura won for the discovery of avermectin, and Youyou Tu won for the discovery of artemisinin. Given both of these products are derived from natural substances, and “natural” remedies are used in different alternative medicine philosophies, it is perhaps not surprising that advocates claimed that this somehow validates practices like Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and naturopathy. The Association of Accredited Naturopathic Medical Colleges (AANMC) made the following announcement on their Facebook page:
Which if you follow the link to the CNN story and actually read it, is surprising. It doesn’t mention naturopathy at all. In fact, when you look closer at the two drugs and their development, this year’s Nobel Prize is actually an excellent case study that illustrates the inherent limitations and weaknesses in alternative medicine systems like naturopathy, herbalism or TCM, while reinforcing just what science-based medicine is capable of delivering. (more…)

AMVETS has joined with The American Association of Naturopathic Physicians in seeking to “promote natural, non-pharmacological approaches to treating patients suffering from chronic pain.” They are petitioning Congress and the VA to authorize bringing licensed NDs into the VA system. As a veteran myself, a retired Air Force Colonel and an MD, I find this appalling. During my twenty years service in the U.S. Air Force as a family physician and flight surgeon, I took pride in the high-quality science-based medical care my colleagues and I were able to provide. This proposal would jeopardize the welfare of our veterans by exposing them to substandard care with irrational, untested, and potentially harmful treatments. Letting naturopaths into the VA would be a grave mistake. (more…)